jmsaul

The recipe here provides a very similar sauce (broth) for curry fish balls. You can even mix them, as they do in Hong Kong. Pictorial: Steamed Curry Squid (Dim Sum), Home Cooking Series 74, 咖哩蒸魷魚 ← Just wanted to say -- I tried that over the weekend, and with the addition of a bit more Sa Cha sauce it is indeed very close to what we had in HK. I cooked the squid and shrimp balls in the sauce on the stove, then removed them and cooked the sauce down a bit to thicken it. Thanks! Now, of course, I have to go back to HK to calibrate it...

We had the curry one -- they were grilled on a stick, and when we ordered it they asked us if we wanted sauce. We said yes (of course!) and they dropped the skewer into a tub of sauce and let it sit for a bit before serving it. I'd like to find an excuse to live in Hong Kong for a while (though I'm told I don't want to be there in the summer -- we were there in late October and it was lovely).

The recipe here provides a very similar sauce (broth) for curry fish balls. You can even mix them, as they do in Hong Kong. Pictorial: Steamed Curry Squid (Dim Sum), Home Cooking Series 74, 咖哩蒸魷魚 ← Thank you! That looks right. And the only thing I need to go get is Sa Cha sauce, which I'm sure I can find at a Chinese grocery...

If you want an irreproachable calamari experience, visit Monahan's Seafood Market in Ann Arbor. Not fine dining in atmosphere, but the calamari are awesome. (So's the rest of the food.)

Our hotel was in Tsim Sha Tsui, and the street food was amazing. One thing we liked were the fish balls they sold. We can get frozen fish balls (though they probably won't be the same), but does anyone have a recipe for the sauce they use with them?

Yep, I'm going to try that next. Thanks!

My wife and I have the Cuisinart pictured in the article (the ICE-50BC). You don't have to freeze anything in advance. All you have to do is walk over to the machine, plug it in, add the custard, and set the timer. It takes about 45 minutes to do 1.5 quarts of most kinds of ice cream; sorbets can go a little longer, and I'm still working on getting a rum ice cream that will solidify but still have enough alcohol to be interesting (yeah, I know about freezing point depression). What you get is relatively soft, but we put it in the freezer to harden, and we get traditional ice cream. Ask the people who were at the eGullet Heartland Gathering; they tried the peanut butter kind: It IS loud. He isn't kidding. We have a long house, and we keep it at the far end of the kitchen. But it also produces a good product, and you can turn out about a batch every hour and ten minutes, including time to clean the stuff for the next cycle. We did an ice cream buffet with six or seven different kinds for a party once. We're very happy with it. You can see some recipes and photos here (scroll down past the fruit with balsamic vinegar, which makes a great ice cream topping but isn't actually ice cream). The blueberry sorbet is still in the mixing container; the others got to sit overnight to cure. One comment: despite what the article implies, after the dasher stops turning, as long as the timer's still going, the coolant keeps going. So you actually can chill the ice cream further in the machine. The only problem is, you wind up freezing the dasher into the ice cream that way.

Everest Express, a Nepalese restaurant with a lot of personality (in a good way, though allow plenty of time for your meal) isn't far from Livonia. (They have two restaurants -- I'm not talking about the one in Royal Oak, which is farther from your specified area and also more expensive.) Matsuchan is an awesome Japanese ramen restaurant that seems very authentic (most of the customers are Japanese, and they have a lot of things I haven't seen anywhere else). It's in Canton. Here's a review.

Yes, but a very light and thin one.

I've had this at a couple dim sum restaurants, but it was wrapped in nori before being fried in a very light coating. Surprisingly good, actually.

Kitchen Chick (who hasn't made her way through registration here yet) has posted her writeup of the Saturday night dinner and wanted me to let you know about it. And she says she'll do the registration thing soon... ;-)

I know what you mean. He does this <a href="http://leutheuser.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/mohanasszchuansquid72.jpg">Asian-inspired squid dish</a>, and I never finish the rice because we order too many things... that couscous was probably really good, though. His sides are awesome.

We didn't go to the Kerrytown part of the trip (for us, it's our regular Saturday morning shopping, so we didn't want to add to the crowd), but <a href="http://www.kitchenchick.com/2006/03/a_feast_at_monh.html">here's some more about Monahan's, for anyone who's interested.</a> No photos of the squid rings there, because he hadn't started doing them yet at that point. But they're great, and he tosses in a few green beans. Alex, what the heck is that side dish he did with the swordfish?

I hate replying three times in a row, but since everyone else is either brunching, in transit, or nursing an absinthe hangover, it falls to me to tell you... it was wonderful. The cameraderie, the food, everything. No review for now (off to Mexicantown to meet some friends) but in the hopes of encouraging others to do the same, here are links to recipes for the desserts Kitchen Chick and I brought (she did the trifle, I did the easy one...). Neither of these were shot at the gathering, they're from earlier www.kitchenchick.com posts: Trifle: Link to recipe for the Trifle Peanut Butter Ice Cream: Link to recipe for the Peanut Butter Ice Cream

Hey, we were driving Fat Guy to the airport. Cut us some slack. We missed one hell of an accident by about 10 minutes, too. On our way back, there were emergency vehicles everywhere -- they were actually turning airport-bound traffic around into our side of the highway.

How about homemade Wagyu pastrami, courtesy of ronnie_suburban? No, I'm not joking. Wow. Oh. My. God.

Uh oh. I've just made a bunch of peanut butter ice cream. Am I not allowed to bring it, or will we just need disposable bowls and spoons?

I don't remember the name but do I remember the flavor - very popluar with adults I believe ← I believe the name was Mandarin Chocolate, and a quick search on Google brought up some other people's recollections and a couple of make alike recipes. Marcia. ← Thank you, thank you, thank you! Not only am I not insane, I can now try to make it in our ice cream maker...

The staff at our local Baskin-Robbins looked at me like I was nuts when I asked about this, so I'll try you... did they once have a sherbet flavor that was something like mandarin orange and chocolate? I remember this from when I was a kid, but so far I seem to be the only person who does.

I know Angelo's doesn't take reservations. I don't know whether Zola does, but I wouldn't try to take a group of 19 in there without them, so you should check. Cafe Marie is really pretty boring.

That ice cream sounds nasty. But I've had a wasabi ice cream that was spicy and very good, and I like chocolate with a bit of cayenne. Moderation is the key here.

You probably want to define what you mean when you use terms like "really good" and "quality" here. You mean "American/Continental fine dining," because that's your personal preference. Ann Arbor has some "really good" restaurants that aren't in that category, and saying it doesn't because of the dearth of "fine dining" is kind of like going to a crowded mall and saying "nobody's here" because you don't see any of your friends... ;-) Ethnic restaurants, which are providing a traditional menu without claiming to be cutting-edge innovators, can be very high quality without rapid menu rotation. A number of good-quality Chinese ones do run specials based on what's available (an example would be Great Lake in Ann Arbor, which I would class as "really good", and which has a white board with a lot of specials) but it isn't a requirement.

Yep, it uses everything but the seeds. Really good, actually. Here's my wife's writeup of the recipe.

Far worse than that right now: M-14 and I-696 are both no-go zones unless you're driving very late at night. There's no good way to get from Ann Arbor to Troy until the construction ends (says the guy who took 2.5 hours to get from Ann Arbor to Royal Oak at rush hour). Best option is probably 59 to 23.

L and I plan to be there again!